Five Times People Noticed Xander
by Dipenates
Summary: Five times people noticed Xander's bruises weren't all from patrol. Warning: violence. Xander/Cordelia, Xander/Faith, Xander and Angel, Xander and Spike, Xander and Oz


**Five times people noticed that Xander Harris's bruises weren't all from patrol **

Warnings: Violence and really, really bad language.**  
**

1.

Cordelia Chase had always had the money to avoid seeing what she didn't want to see. Poverty. Homelessness. People who couldn't shop Rodeo Drive.

The first time she had seen Xander in his speedos her heart had fluttered at the way he fit in to the perfect narrative she had about boyfriends who scored big at high school sports. And the way he fit into the speedos.

The third time she had seen Xander in his speedos she nearly dropped the protein shake she had lovingly bought for him from a local health food place.

He had been at home every night, sleeping off Coach Marin's insane practice schedule. So where did the bruise come from? The one that spread across his cappuccino-foam skin like the navy of her favourite Chanel handbag.

She saw, for the first time, what a boy who spent his Christmases under the stars might be avoiding. What the fallout from living with two messy drunks might be. She would have paid to have those visions taken away from her.

2.

It was hard work getting your happies with an inexperienced teenage boy, but Faith reasoned that Xander was _here_ in her motel roomand if that wasn't the universe tossing her a snackfuck then she didn't know what.

As she yanked off his shirt and pushed him onto the bed in one slick move, she was trying to work out if everything she needed him to know could be shown instead of told. Then she froze.

The bruises on his arms were dark against the grimy sheets. Finger marks, each one distinct, and Faith didn't have to be told that someone had grabbed and shaken him until his teeth mashed together and his head cracked off the wall. Funny, given that she and B had been taking care of the vamps by themselves for weeks.

Her gaze slid off his. She couldn't stand to see the shame in his brown eyes.

_I thought we had a connection. _

She ruthlessly clamped down on thoughts of her stepfather as she climbed out of her underwear. Thinking about him while she was fucking was the shortest route to the nuthouse she could conceive of.

It wasn't until afterwards when they were lying across Faith's rumpled sheets with the sweat cooling on their bodies that she realised that her own body had betrayed her yet again. In the moment she had run her hands over Xander like he was a precious jewel; tracing her fingers down his arms with a feather light touch. The look on his face had nearly jerked a sob from her throat and she had to get him out of her motel room now, now, _now. _

3

He knew Tony Harris was a piece of work from the fact that Xander smelt more of fear when Angel walked him home than he ever did on patrol.

He'd opened his mouth on more than one occasion to tell Xander about Liam's father. To express some solidarity with the half-boy half-man struggling with the father-son dynamic. To tell him that, yes, Liam had been all kinds of asshole but that something had broken in him the day he opened his sister's bedroom door to see his father on top of her; had lent a different flavour to his father's hard breathing as he beat him.

His demon was a thousand times more familiar with the other side of the equation. He had tormented children in every way it was possible to imagine: like a trawler leaving behind a thin strip of churning water, he had left debasement and defilement in his path.

The books the Scoobies pored over were unflinching in their descriptions of Angelus and, even with Giles running interference, Angel knew that Xander must know that he had emptied himself into every available man, woman and child across Europe, Asia and the Americas. He knew that Xander must know about the torture and the beatings and the death.

Maybe Xander saw most clearly the ambiguities in Angel. Maybe Xander reasoned that Angel couldn't ever properly relate to humans again with the scent of their terror curled into his brain like cigar smoke into a club chair. Maybe he was right.

The smell of Xander's fear tickled a part of Angel that he couldn't and wouldn't describe to Buffy or Giles. And so he kept walking him home.

4

They were always too late, those educational films that schools showed. Sex education long after your first fumble with some bad girl from the Catholic school in the next town. Anti-smoking messages after you'd sucked down your first pack of Marlboros, and practiced holding them in the sleeve of your t-shirt like James Dean.

The Teen Hotline film they showed in gym class in twelfth grade was ostensibly about the stress of college applications and career choices but it covered the usual litany of other issues. Depression. Abuse. Drinking. Drugs. Schoolwork. Bullying. Family problems. Eating disorders. Steroids. Sex.

Xander imagined Buffy and Willow watching. Or rather, Willow watching while Buffy played with her hair; pulling the strands in front of her eyes to check for split ends.

The guy who was narrating the abuse section looked kind of like him. _Tell a teacher if someone is hurting you or touching you places you don't want to be touched. _

That got the predictable range of cat-calls and whistles from the class but Xander went hot and cold; felt his face sting with shame.

Next to him in the bleachers Oz sniffed the air delicately, like a maiden aunt trying to decide if the lavender bags were still scenting her closet, and went still. Xander wouldn't have expected Oz to join in the hollering that was causing Coach to rake the group of boys with his disapproving glare. But he could feel Oz actively not looking at him and that meant he knew. He _knew. _

At lunch, while Buffy riffed on slayage and the difficulty of keeping a French manicure in good order while wielding a stake, Xander wondered if he would tell Willow.

5

Spike was lounging in his chair in the most louche manner that someone tied up in Willow's best Girl Scout knots could manage. Xander watched the flicker of the TV screen dance across his alabaster skin and tried to ignore the faint sounds of the fight going on above his head.

("No, fuck _you_, stupid bitch!" Xander estimated that the crashing sound was a dinner plate. It sounded too thick to be a glass.

"Go fuck yourself, Tony. You're a lazy, selfish cunt who hasn't bought home a decent pay packet in ten years." His mother's voice, wounded and slurring.)

"Rory, Rory, Rory. You _cannot _think that going out with this Jess feller is a good idea. What about Dean? Stars Hollow's very own answer to Captain America. He's a bit uptight, right enough, but he treats you like a pretty princess." Spike was grinning at the set.

"Maybe she's after mean and moody rather than buff and boring? Some chicks might dig having their boy-toy all chummy with Mommy but our girl Rory makes much more with the off-beat."

("Speaking of cunts, I wish I'd never been near yours." Tony Harris was screaming at the top of his voice now. "Might not have ended up trapped in this fucking hell-hole with you and that shit-for-brains.")

Xander cut a nervous glance at Spike. "Although maybe if she went with Jess she wouldn't have to pay for all that burger-y goodness."

(_Smack. _The sound of a fist hitting flesh and then someone hitting a wall. Xander flinched, weighing up the options of taking his licks now or waiting til his father bellowed for him to come upstairs.)

"You think she'd still have to pay at Luke's Diner? If she was with Jess?" Xander's voice was as transparent and crackling as cellophane.

Spike took a drag on his cigarette and looked right at Xander.

"I'm not going to tell the Watcher or the rest of your little friends."

Xander frowned. "You're not?"

"Evil, remember? It's all the same to me if he beats you to death."


End file.
